J-Card Press is open for submissions from February 1 to April 30, 2025
To write a J-Card book, please get in touch with the following:
The group you’d like to write about
Why that band would make a good subject for a J-Card book
Why you’re the right person to write the book
How much of an audience currently exists for the band (and thus the book)
Proposed table of contents, or some idea of how you’d structure the book or tell the story
Writing samples
Professional bio
How long you think it would take you to write the book
Once the submission period ends, we'll take a month or so to process and look over all of the submissions. We'll begin notifying writers of accepted submissions over the summer.
Send materials in an email or as a single document in either Word or PDF format to submissions@jcardpress.com.
Keep in mind
The length of a J-Card book is around 40-45K words. We feel that’s enough space to cover a band’s history and their albums without including stuff like gossip or score-settling. We also want these to be more or less straight forward biographies.
We’re only looking to publish books about bands. This means no solo artists or individual songwriters. Our aim is to see how people come together to create something, and how they weather that storm over time.
The genres we’re looking to cover are alternative, indie rock, hip-hop, and riot grrrl. If you want to make a pitch for something else, feel free, but know it won’t be our first choice.
J-Card’s focus is on groups that were started, or whose first record came out, more or less in the nineties. We're not interested in bands from the sixties or seventies, and we aren't looking for pitches on groups who formed in just the past decade or so.
We're interested in groups who have not yet been the subject of a book. So if you're thinking of writing about a Seattle or Sub Pop band, don't choose Nirvana, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, and so on.
When deciding on a subject, don’t immediately choose your favorite band. Instead, think of a group who have a really interesting story or discography, and then think of an engaging way to tell that story.
If you've already secured some level of endorsement for the project or a pledge of participation from the band or their management, be sure to mention that since it will add to the strength of your proposal.
If the only way you're going to be able to tell the story of the band is to have some input from the band, it's best to secure that involvement before submitting a proposal. We don't want to sign a contract only to discover the band has no interest in taking part.